A lot of other comments have touched on things well. My experience as a corporate is that I often find the 'US local' is a thin shell of sales/leadership, someone I feel I can hold accountable when I'm not getting results during the engagement, and the hands-on tactical folks on their team are typically globally dispersed. This has never been a hard sell for me internally to get approved. It's quite silly on our part because we end up paying $200/hr for resources that probably only see $30/hr of it; but finding a whole team of SME's in some Enterprise SW that are entirely US based can be quite difficult too.

All said, you need to setup a US based sales office. Even if it's just optics, deflect and say you spend a lot of your time with the engineer's in India but come to States frequently for client meetings, then offer to fly to US for key points of the contract, etc. But, the key is making people think your operations is US based in the first-impression phase.

What you say, makes sense! But I'm not even finding myself that much further in the sales funnel yet. I'm at the top end at the moment.

Let's say you have US presence, how do you go about customer acquisition?

(I do have a couple of friends in US, whom I can hire - these people are not core-tech, more of analyst profiles, but I will help with boots on ground, if needed.)